Wheelerof4te wrote:Just tried it again to make sure. Indeed, you must tick DDE AND DE you want, otherwise the installation fails. Sorry for the misinfo.

*You* didn't provide any misleading information until now. It is sufficient to tick the wanted DE to get it. Ticking DDE is not necessary, but will not do any harm. That worked for me when putting cinnamon on a machine. 'apt-cache show task-cinnamon-desktop' has

To me seems a little bit ridiculous to dredge up a thread that hasn't been posted to since early November 2015.

You could answer your questions about the packages by running apt-cache show for the packages and examining and comparing the depends and recommends for them as below. Notice that task-desktop (Description: Debian desktop environment) is a depends of task-xfce-desktop.

dvp1964 wrote:I can not believe we can not get an answer from someone on the Debian team who actually knows.Is it just a left-ver option from years past? Perhaps so.

Well, I don't know that anyone on the "Debian team" ever reads posts here. I'm not even sure I know what you mean by Debian team. If you think something should be changed in the installer tasksel you could file a bug to try and get developer attention.

The “Desktop environment” task will install a graphical desktop environment.

By default, debian-installer installs the Gnome desktop environment. It is possible to interactively select a different desktop environment during the installation. It is also possible to install multiple desktops, but some combinations of desktop may not be co-installable.

First of all, the top of the list is somehow related to all the window managers starting with "..." - but it's not really clear, at all, what it means to select Debian desktop environment. It is impossible to discern. Actually, it appears that it's equivalent to ticking GNOME from reading other comments in this thread, but who really knows.

Secondly, "web server". I mean, really. Is that Apache, or NGINX or something else? If you want a web server, I'm sure you know how to use apt - why is this an option at this stage of the install? It's not as though you can interact with your installed web server in any meaningful way without first writing some code, perhaps in a terminal window.

Lastly, why would standard system utilities be an option (or optional?) What are standard system utilities, in any case? That could mean anything.

jasonz wrote:Secondly, "web server". I mean, really. Is that Apache, or NGINX or something else?

Please read documentation.

By default, debian-installer installs the Gnome desktop environment. It is possible to interactively select a different desktop environment during the installation. It is also possible to install multiple desktops, but some combinations of desktop may not be co-installable. The various server tasks will install software roughly as follows. Web server: apache2; Print server: cups; SSH server: openssh. The “Standard system” task will install any package that has a priority “standard”. This includes a lot of common utilities that are normally available on any Linux or Unix system. You should leave this task selected unless you know what you are doing and want a really minimal system.